Decision Sprint: The New Way to Innovate into the Unknown and Move from Strategy to Action

By Atif Rafiq

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller

“Atif has been at the center of Internet and digital disruption for over 20 years, building on 15 years of experience in pure play tech companies such as Amazon, where he led large scale, fast growing digital businesses.”—CNBC

Fearlessly delve into the unknown with breakthrough methods to put your company on the path to innovation, creativity, and growth.

It’s no secret that steering a business has become dramatically more complex and uncertain in our modern era. Constant exploration of new territory by teams is the name of the game. Yet most companies are stuck with yesterday’s approach to problem solving. Problem solving needs to be reinvented to meet today’s challenges. The future of business depends on it.

Having reached the highest levels of the Fortune 500, digital disrupter Atif Rafiq has written Decision Sprint to pull the curtain back on the hidden management systems within your organization that impact how people think, collaborate, and make decisions.

Talent is vital to any company’s advancement, but it’s the collaboration and problem solving systems that separate industry leaders from the rest. Systems designed to embrace unknowns are the quickest, most enduring way to foster growth, continuous innovation, and results. Learn how teams begin with upstream work—the phase of a promising idea or initiative where the unknowns predominate—to problem solve anything, thus unlocking downstream actions from alignment to decision making to execution.

With Rafiq’s guidance, you’ll overtake your competitors by moving upstream, embracing workflows that convert unknowns to clear recommendations, alignment, and action. In addition, you’ll receive direct advice from the CEOs/presidents of H&R Block, Volvo, Peacock, Restaurant Brands, Orange Theory Fitness, among others—and learn from in-depth case studies such as Amazon’s disruption of publishing, the massive digital transformation of McDonald’s, the secret of launch of Apple Pay, Volvo’s push for sustainability, and more.

Don’t just be ready for the next frontier of business, be continuously ready for the unknowns with Decision Sprint.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781264609864

Book preview

PART ONE

THE METHOD

The Hidden World of Upstream Work

When I was appointed chief digital officer at McDonald’s, culture change was just as much a deliverable as delivering new experiences, business models, or services. My mindset was to lead teams in the way that had produced results for Amazon and other Silicon Valley companies where I grew up. Start with big thinking and then problem-solve to bring ideas to life.

But these ideas don’t have a shot when culture is a headwind. Culture is less about slogans and words than about how work and collaboration occur in an organization. That’s why I dedicate an entire chapter to workflows and another chapter on how to reinforce the substance of these workflows with language.

I demonstrate how workflows express culture and, more important, how to develop workflows to move culture. The power of this can’t be understated, because it enables a team to change the culture from the bottom up.

In this chapter, I discuss my experiences with transformation at McDonald’s and Volvo. Transformation is the generational leap companies attempt in an important area, whether it be the customer experience, product, or business model. Some companies—especially consumer brands that are now direct-to-consumer businesses—are making the leap across multiple facets at once. While much was accomplished at both organizations, I’ve learned a lot about the promise and pitfalls of solving for big ideas in an organization. I’ve had experiences with top-down and bottom-up change and explain how they come together. Teams don’t need to wait for top-down change. In fact, it’s best when they kick-start it. What motivated me to develop Decision Sprint is to unlock why and how this makes sense for everyone in the organization.

ME AND MICKEY D’S

My first major project briefing at McDonald’s involved the mobile app, something we wanted to roll out globally. That’s a big deal when you serve 100 million customers daily. The project itself had been struggling to get off the ground. And the tension was building.

The CEO had charged a corporate squad with building it, but when your company operates in over 100 countries in a decentralized model, there were also competing efforts in countries that were trying to build something similar faster. You may think McDonald’s is a single corporate behemoth, but in some respects, it can be more like a federation of many companies. There’s a power in that for marketing and sales, but it’s muted when it comes to consumer technology.

Before I arrived on the scene, these competing forces had been in play for almost two years, and no one was happy with the progress on digital. Corporate was viewed as proceeding too slowly, while the countries were taking shortcuts in building apps that ultimately hit a wall. Consumers were baffled.

When I arrived, we counted no fewer than 25 apps for McDonald’s in the US app store. These included apps that worked only in Brazil and Poland, and even apps for specific regions within the United States. Digital was a hugely fragmented effort, which was not set up for success. Now add the big picture: McDonald’s needed new ways to bring in customers and business. The company was in a real pickle, with several consecutive quarters of same-store sales decline and no major growth drivers on the horizon. The heat was on.

Most people were skeptical about digital being a growth driver—but not our CEO, Don Thompson. He was out in front of the trend. Through his Silicon Valley relationships and his passion for what’s next, Don created the first chief digital officer role in the history of the Fortune 500 and hired me to take it on.

At the time, very few could see how technology would reshape the experience of doing things in the physical world, such as getting a meal from McDonald’s. Remember, there was no Uber Eats, Airbnb, or Instacart. There was much at stake for Thompson to prove digitization was a good bet and accelerate the company’s business turnaround. He was confronted with a compound challenge: the company badly needed a customer breakthrough and internal forces were tugging in several directions, making collaboration very difficult.

James Floyd, who was general manager and VP of operations for McDonald’s company-owned restaurants, put it this way:

The mood with respect to technology when Atif joined was skepticism. We are the #1 QSR (quick service restaurant) in the world. It’s easy to take the position if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Especially because the company has tried innovations that didn’t work, like McSalad Shakers and McLean. Maybe digital will just die on the vine. And the complexity for McDonald’s is very high to begin with. Globally we have 34,000 restaurants. Germany, France, United Kingdom, Australia, Latin America, Brazil—everybody kind of had their own technology. The idea of company-wide product development and strategy seemed a reach. There were a lot of moving parts to pull together into a combined effort on behalf of the juggernaut.

INPUT OR OUTPUT?

I remember my first executive project briefing. To be at the head of the table in such a meeting is both a luxury and a mountain of responsibility. First, you occupy the power seat and need to be ready. If you’re not careful, your tone of voice and small nuances in words can be interpreted differently than you intend.

Many people attended the meeting, probably around 30. It was a signal of how seriously people in the organization perceived our mission.

Being so new to the company, I wanted to respect the flow of the meeting and how the team had crafted the agenda. The presentation was not very interactive; it was led by different people across facets of the project. Curiosities and clarifying questions piled up in my mind. I realized that with so many people involved in the project, I was unclear where to direct questions. We were heavily resourced, yet everyone was operating in silos.

Reflecting on that first meeting, I had one regret. A single question I could have asked would have changed the entire tenor. A question that would challenge people to think differently and begin to shift the norms of the company: "Is this an input meeting or an output meeting?"

An output meeting is like the end point of sausage making. You taste the product and like it or not. Then you try to guess why. An input meeting shares how the sausage is planned to be made. And you can help steer what it becomes before sending it down the assembly line. (See Figure 1.1.)

FIGURE 1.1 Upstream work is focused on the inputs.

Consider a typical strategic initiative in a company. Typically, these initiatives are characterized by many unknowns. But many large organizations approach an innovation challenge with an execution mindset. That’s how their culture develops during periods of scale, as they move from being led by founders to professional managers. So when faced with an important initiative, companies resort quickly to detailed project planning, taking comfort in tasks and dates. When such plans are built on weak or insufficient understanding of the problem, they create a false sense of confidence. (See Figure 1.2.)

FIGURE 1.2 Upstream work is reflected downstream.

In essence, with a stable business formula, organizations lose muscle memory when tackling the new and fall back on execution culture. Execution culture emphasizes the known commodities, whereas competitive advantage is at the edge of what is already understood. The new territory comes with more unknowns than knowns, which tends to be where the execution culture cannot cope. It lacks agility. By that, I mean the ability to dance with the unknowns.

As the leader of a big bet at McDonald’s, I did not want to create a false sense of confidence along these lines. We needed to dance with the unknowns rather than taking comfort in our excellence with execution. Knowing execution culture wouldn’t serve the company’s interests gave me discomfort in the meeting. To help McDonald’s succeed, I quickly realized I needed to shift the focus to the upstream work.

WHERE IT STARTS: INPUT OBSESSION

Let’s turn back to the question from my early days at McDonald’s, Is this an input meeting or an output meeting? Input meetings allow you to spend time with the unknowns. Output meetings require that key unknowns are explored to the right level and sufficiently understood. You want to get the sequence right.

It’s fair to seek to understand how conclusions and recommendations are drawn. Nothing is more relevant for leaders of growth and innovation efforts than understanding if the right unknowns surfaced, what was learned about them, and how the exploration of these issues impacts the plans on the table. With input meetings, we provide a space for that. In their absence, leaders are left to make decisions from the other side of the glass without feeling the texture. It’s more like window-shopping than actually touching the fabric.

In those early days at the fast-food icon, I could not put my finger on the disconnect between the management culture I was trying to establish and what the organization was accustomed to. All the dynamics that make meetings easy, encouraging the path of least resistance, also make them a dangerous pitfall. I did not want us to step into them in my early days at McDonald’s.

It’s easy to sit back, make remarks about accountability for results, and take comfort in forecasts and plans. The hard part is surfacing the reasoning, thought process, and considerations behind the issues—to know whether you’re on solid or shaky ground. Many leaders simply do not do it or lack the methods. Input meetings provide a way to perform this calibration. But an output meeting that needs to be pivoted to an input meeting is a delicate maneuver.

At that first McDonald’s meeting, I remember saying to myself—I am sitting here, responsible for the digital future of a $100 billion company and about to make a multibillion bet to turn strategy into results. All eyes in the room eventually turned to me—and I’m feeling uneasy about things. I am being spoon-fed the output, yet I want to understand and shape the input.

Should I start asking questions and get my head around the inputs? Or maybe I should trust that everything has been vetted the right way? The team isn’t accustomed to a senior leader being drawn into the fabric making and testing. It’s not a norm for leaders at the top at McDonald’s like it is at Amazon. It’s unfamiliar territory because it is not the model.

The problem was just as rooted in me as it was in the process. Let me be clear about that. I couldn’t even explain how the meeting should flow or how to reverse the course of it to address my concerns. We were coming from two different planets at this point in the journey. There was no language to connect the two planets. I could not explain my expectations. Over the next 10 years, I developed the language, words, and methods to connect the planets. (See Figure 1.3.)

FIGURE 1.3 Upstream provides space to address unknowns.

The story has a happy ending, as far as the bottom line is concerned.

McDonald’s experienced a sustained business turnaround and sales growth through new digital experiences like in-store kiosks, curbside pick-up, delivery, mobile order ahead, and new ways to drive promotions. Billions were served since the company’s founding in 1960—and billions more were served through digital since those efforts started in 2013.

We modernized stores, we were a founding partner for Apple Pay, we introduced new service models and digital experiences, and we developed new roles, skills, and capabilities. And we did it on a global scale most companies could not imagine. Most of the customer experience behind McDonald’s runs on common platforms, whether you order food in Sweden or Morocco.

Most important, it became real in the restaurants and made the leap from corporate PowerPoint slides.

James Floyd, reflecting on the impact in the United States, remarks:

At one point, we were getting so many sales from digital channels like delivery, we couldn’t keep up with those sales. The iPads in the restaurant would just ping, ping, ping, another order, another order, and another one. We needed somebody just to manage those orders. Sometimes people disconnected the devices because they couldn’t keep up with the orders that were coming in via mobile. That was early on, so we developed remedies. It was a learning curve to service the incremental customers and business in a different way.

FIRST MOVER, ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE

As McDonald’s gained notoriety for success with digital, the role of CDO spread like wildfire, with almost every large company establishing the position—a development that created visibility for me. I subsequently helped three global household brands boost their agility and drive business growth as a result.

But could it have been more? Could McDonald’s have become Uber Eats before there was one? Or at least driven customer orders through the McDonalds’ app, and limit Uber and DoorDash to fulfillment (using their dashers), so it could keep the customer relationship? What about cloud and ghost kitchens? A loyalty program that might have been rolled out five years earlier? Coffee subscriptions? How about going big on Tesla Superchargers in parking lots (our team tested this with progressive franchisees)? New menu items that change the perception of the food while bringing in new customers? And what about bringing new, agile ways of working throughout the entire company, not just on the customer experience or digital side of things?

Can a company that lost one million existing customers a year for the last 10 years afford to slow the pace of new ideas? The unknowns behind these questions were too challenging to fathom or even muster the willingness to explore. If we embraced more change on how we work, could we put in motion more of what is shipped to the customer?

While McDonald’s introduced new customer experiences and service models, the inner workings of how those experiences and models were developed were anything but smooth. It was choppy for everyone involved. We rode the fault line between two